


Wander out of beaten ways

by Corycides



Series: Walk in my garden [1]
Category: The Tomorrow People (2013)
Genre: Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-08
Updated: 2013-12-08
Packaged: 2018-01-03 23:07:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1074127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corycides/pseuds/Corycides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stephen knew there would be fall out for costing Jedikiah his lover, Morgan. He just didn't realise it wouldn't be aimed directly at him...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wander out of beaten ways

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LadySilver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadySilver/gifts).



> Response to the Trope Prompt list challenge - 'Can I ask for #9 with Stephen/Astrid (or Stephen + Astrid, whatevs)? Perhaps Astrid breaks out or gets a temporary taste of power' - by LadySilver

In the year and a half since Astrid’s Gran died, she’d grown used to a certain subset of the population greeting her with condolences. They were always scientists, they were usually in suits. Stephen’s uncle fit the bill. Even the phrasing, the tonalities were pitch perfect.

‘I knew your grandmother,’ Dr Price said. ‘She was a brilliant woman. I was sorry to hear of her passing. It was a great loss.’

Of course, the thought flitted through Astrid’s brain on hysterical, little rat feet, usually the so sorry scientists hadn’t _tied her up first_! She twisted her wrists against the heavy, padded leather cuffs. There was no wriggle room, the hard edge of the buckle compressing the joints of her thumbs.

‘Let me go?’ she begged.

She wanted her voice to be sassy and prickly - a la Lydia from Teen Wolf - instead it was small and sad, full of fear and tears. It was lot harder to sass when you thought you were going to die. Nothing unsavoury though. He’d assured her of that when she first came around, smiling tolerantly through her screams and panic.

‘I’m afraid, I can’t,’ Jedikiah sighed, clasping his hands behind his back. ‘You see, Stephen took something precious from me. He needs to learn...the price of interference. It’s my own fault. He reminded me of his father; I was too tolerant. He’s forced my hand, and it was either you or Luca - who is, after all, my nephew.’

Astrid swallowed hard, feeling hot and sick and odd. She was going to die. She was going to die an almost-virgin who’d spent far too much time mooning over her idiot best friends idiot pretty face.

‘Please,’ she said, voice scratchy sore in her throat. ‘I don’t want to die.’

He smoothed her hair back from her forehead with a warm, dry hand. ‘You aren’t going to die; just...change. Ironically enough, this formula is based on your grandmother’s work.’

Astrid started to cry. She was too scared to even be ashamed of the weak, snuffling snorts that choked their way out of her throat. Jedikiah wiped her face considerately with a handkerchief as one of the dead eyed techs in white coats came forwards with a horse-sized needle full of pale pink liquid. Like serum. The jab hurt, carelessly scraping bone on the way down, and then they pressed the plunger.

It….it...it

It burned; it scraped; it bruised; it _ruined_.

There were no words for how badly it hurt, no words for the way it hurt. Astrid screamed until she tasted blood and for days she couldn’t speak without her voice breaking into nothing.

‘Change,’ Jedikiah said, folding his handkerchief thoughtfully between his fingers. ‘Then die. Unfortunately.’

* * *

Odessa Finch had been Jamaican by way of Brixton, a scholarship girl with a mind sharp as the pruning shears she used on her plants. She’d worn her hair in a huge cloud of stone grey curls and when anyone complained, said ‘If it was good enough for Einstein...’. No-one had ever really approved of her; she would have been disappointed if they had.

She’d been a botanist. There was a unique species of orchid she’d named after her grand-daughter, her only grandchild. She’d not have approved of her life’s work being used to kill the girl. Jedikiah couldn’t quite resist indulging the superstitious notion that was why the girl was clinging on.

Not that it was a kindness. Astrid Finch lay on black, cruciform bed, arms and legs strapped down tight to the leather. Pink sweat on her skin - infused with blood - and her lips split raw and bitten. Her fingers were split from clawing at the leather. She had, at least, stopped screaming.

‘She isn’t rejecting the graft?’ the Founder asked, cocking an eyebrow.

‘Not yet,’ Jedikiah admitted.

‘You sound disappointed.’

‘Mm,’ Jedikiah shrugged. ‘Success or failure are...data points. This is just pending.’

The Founder shifting, giving Jedikiah an arch look. ‘Speaking of pending, what are you going to do about your nephew?’

‘Nothing,’ Jedikiah said, voice mildly, firmly neutral. ‘Not yet. He could still prove useful and he’s convinced he’s pulled the wool entirely over all our eyes.’

‘Family trait,’ the Founder said, voice dangerously mild. ‘How is the search for that breakout going. Morgan, wasn’t it?’

They smiled thinly at each other. Two dangerous men who’d known each other a long time and found that need and dislike was a good substitute for friendship.

* * *

 

It didn’t hurt any more. Or if it did she couldn’t process it. Her mind felt like an old jumper, full of holes and pulling apart at the seams in great, ragged hanks. There wasn’t enough left of it for her to care. Sometimes she’d gasp, lungs cramping and aching, and realise that she’d forgotten to breathe, forgotten how to breathe.

Jedikiah was a bright point of constancy in her orbit - sometimes closer, sometimes further away. Always there. Curious. Affectionate in the way she remembered from her Gran with her favourite orchids. The experimental ones.

There was a new one today. A mind dark and folded in as a seed. Something there. Something she could use. Just, pull in the pieces - tuck the edges in under where they were safe. Compress her mind in and down, make it dense and weighted. She found the pain again, but it came with the rest of her too.

Change. He’d changed her. She closed eyes that felt sticky and sore - hard, and wasn’t that a disturbing thought - and tried to find enough thread ends to tie a thought together.

Jedikiah wanted to make her a Tomorrow Person, like Stephen.

No. Wrong.

This was a punishment. Jedikiah wanted to fail at making her a Tomorrow Person. She was meant to die - expected - to die.

Instead, she was just...stuck. Except she’d been able to use the dark seed man to twist and braid her thoughts into something linear, trap them close enough together to touch. Maybe she could use the other flicker minds that dreamed in and out around her?

She let the seed-container crack, her mind diffusing out through the compound. The minds closest to her were no good. Whatever they’d known before they’d forgotten for screaming, just madness locked neatly behind walls that she - neither one thing or the other - ghosted through.

It hurt - barely compared to everything else, though.

A girl with a mind like mirrors, brittle and see-through but protected at the core. A man with a ticking metronome of awareness measuring everything around him. A boy...a Stephen, who was terribly sad and thinking about a girl he missed - and the squeeze of her hands in his when they’d teleported.

Enough, that was enough. She dragged her thoughts back in - most of them, some had gotten lost, frayed and scattered. It was still enough. Astrid stretched out, trying to still the juddering fits of her muscles, and focused on that distant, fizzing memory.

She took the bed and half the walls with her, slapping the brick and treated metal out of reality like a child throwing a tantrum. It shattered through the space between places, sparkling like fireworks as it was viciously shredded into atoms and particles.

There was something out there, drifting in the cold going-nowhere of between. It bumped curiously against Astrid’s mind - pulling at the strings with idle amusement. She wasn’t right - like the masonry - but she wasn’t wrong either. It let her go, losing interest.

She collapsed at her Dad’s door, shivering and barefoot and barely dressed. In Hawai’i, a world away from where she should have been. Her aim had never been her best quality.

* * *

 

It had been three months. Astrid had disappeared, stolen off the street in broad daylight. People that happened to didn’t come back, but she had. Her hair was longer and threaded with silver at the temples, her hands scarred.

IV lines. He knew that - he was a nurse’s son - but Astrid insisted she didn’t remember. Anything.

He thought she was lying. What was he going to say though ‘Hey, you know the way you were kidnapped and maybe-tortured and traumatised so much your Dad fought against letting you come back here and your mom - who hates him - actually listened? Yeah, I wanna talk about that. What was it like?’ Be like all the kids at school who treated her like something halfway between a celebrity and a freakshow. He knew what that felt that from the inside.

She picked absently at her muffin, taking it neatly apart and dividing it into its component ingredients. Cranberries on one side of the plate, white chocolate chunks on the other and a pile of muffin crumbs in the middle. It was a new habit, taking things apart: pens, food, clocks, computers. It scared him.

‘There’s a party tonight,’ he said, leaning over and covering her hand with his. ‘Why don’t we go? You can get a new dress. I’ll help you pick it out?’

A shadow of her old smile tucked the corner of her mouth, big brown eyes studying him wryly. ‘Wow. I must look rough.’

‘I’m worried,’ Stephen admitted. He squeezed her fingers. ‘I’m usually the basketcase.’

She gave him an arch, wordless lift of her eyebrows and pursed her lips. A mute ‘really?’ hovering between them. A quick review of the conversation and he winced, closing his eyes.

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to… I’m sorry.’

Astrid ruffled his hair. ‘I’m fine. I have homework, though. You go, have fun. Take Cara.’

She slid off her seat, leaving the deconstructed muffin. He caught her arm before she could go.

‘I do love you,’ he said and waited.

‘I love you too,’ she said, touching and leaning in for a hug. ‘You’re a good friend.’

That wasn’t what he’d been waiting for, but there was no wistful echo from her mind. No sure, steady upsurge of emotion. Just affection and a buss on the cheek.

Friends. Good friends.

He ate her abandoned chocolate chips. It really was like one of those corny movies. He finally realised what he’d lost...only he’d actually lost it.

Back in the subway station Cara dragged him into the ring to spar. She was lithe and leggy, deadly and beautiful and maybe, sorta his. Sometimes he wondered if she was happy with that. It was good between them, it was sweet, but was that enough?

She kicked his feet out from under him, dumping him on his ass, and dropped to her knees across his hips. He grinned and reached for her waist, trying to pull her down for a kiss. She slapped his hands away impatiently.

‘Focus,’ she snapped, jumping back to her feet. Slim hands twisted her hair back from her face, winding it up into a knot on the back of her head. Her arms were all lean definition, muscle under tawny skin. Tight and twitchy with frustration he couldn’t tap. ‘Ultra aren’t going to take a break from a fight to snuggle.’

She missed John. Hell, Stephen missed John. He’d not realised how much it sucked to be leader until he had to be, when there was no one else to be the unpopular dick, to make the rough decisions. No-one else to keep the secrets Cara would leave him for.

‘I’m worried about Astrid,’ he said.

Cara rolled her eyes and sighed. ‘Worry about yourself,’ she said. ‘Worry about us. She’s a sap, there’s thousands of people to worry about her.’

Somehow, she looked a little less lovely.

* * *

 

Sometimes Astrid was painfully aware of the bits of her that had frayed off and drifted away before the dark seed man showed her how to hold herself together, how to change the gravity of her thoughts. There was no reason to keep her new abilities from Stephen, every reason to tell him. She loved him; she hated Jedikiah. This would destroy the only thing the man had left that was normal, his twisted, falsehood of a relationship with his brother’s son.

Except.

She didn’t, not really. Jedikiah was her constant, watchful monster; Stephen was the Prince Charming who picked an amazon over the damsel in distress. Loving or hating them felt too….small, too compact for her right now. Maybe she’d get it back. She loved her Dad and her Mum, a warm, fizzy cloud of good that was big enough to catch all of her in it.

Sometimes Astrid tried to remember if that was the way human’s loved, if there was anything human about it. It was a bit upsetting not to be able to remember.

She sat on the edge of the Eiffel Tower in her pyjamas, eating a cheese sandwich and watching the moon. It wasn’t - shouldn’t be - night here. It had been midnight when she left home; midnight when she landed here. Astrid had decided not to worry about that. She’d just enjoy the view. Sometimes she really didn’t get the Tomorrow People, popping in and out around New York, like teleportation was just a quicker version of the bus. A convenience, a shortcut.

Since she’d worked how to do it, she’d been to Cairo and Ireland and the Alps (mostly an accident, her powers weren’t as slick and slide sure as Stephen’s. More like...grabbing two slippery things and wedging them together long enough to wriggle through.

Down below she felt a flicker of worry, confusion ‘...is that a...’ She popped out - wriggled out - before they could finish the thought, leaving his brain to fill in the blanks with something sane.

Except she pulled an Alps and missed her bedroom by a mile. By 12 miles and a small yearning to remember how she’d felt before.

‘Bum,’ she said.

In the boxing ring Stephen stared at her, huge eyed and gawp mouthed. ‘Astrid?’ he managed, before Cara clocked him one and sent him crashing onto his back.

‘Cara!’ one of the audience squeaked in a strangled voice, waving a small hand frantically in the air. ‘Behind you!’

It was like panto. Astrid giggled, gulped it down, and gave Cara her best cat smile when the woman spun to look at her.

‘Surprise?’

She ended up tied to a chair. Her body promptly panicked, sweat on her palms and her heart stuttering along like a foundering racehorse, battering against the cage of her ribs. Her mind ignored it, detaching from the receptors that had to deal with that sort of thing.

‘How did you get there,’ Cara snapped. She stalked like a cat, hair swishing like a tail. ‘Did Ultra send you? Did Jedikiah?’

That Astrid felt happy to answer. ‘No.’

‘No?’ Cara said, stopping. ‘That’s it. No. I’m meant to believe that?’

She stepped forward and grabbed Astrid’s head, thumbs pressing against her temples. Her mind pushed, leaning against Astrid’s mind like it was a door. The pressure ached down into Astrid’s bones, but Cara wasn’t as strong as Jedikiah’s awl-minded killers, or not as ruthless maybe. She couldn’t/wouldn’t hurt Astrid enough to crack through her seed.

‘What did they do to you?’ Cara asked, but it felt like an accusation against Astrid’s mind. Revulsion, resentment scraped over her temple-bones. ‘What are you?’

The world tilted, shearing off its axis by degrees, and Steven stumbled in. ‘Cara! That’s enough,’ he said, grabbing her arm and yanking her back. ‘Leave her alone.’

‘She’s one of Jedikiah’s freaks,’ Cara spat. ‘Some mongrel...’

‘Hybrid,’ Astrid corrected. ‘Mongrel implies chance; hybrids are made on purpose.’

Stephen dragged Cara away, bullying her into staying by the door. He turned back to Astrid and stared at her like he was lost.

‘What happened?’

She opened her mouth to say something…right then she didn’t know if it would be flip or the truth or cruel. Or all of those things. Instead she just shrugged, a tired hunch of her shoulders.

‘I changed.’

Stephen crouched down in front of her, hands cupping her knees through cotton-candy pink pyjamas. ‘Usually, people say that when they’ve got a new hairdo. You’re shaking.’

‘I don’t like being tied up, and my hair is so cute.’

He rubbed his hands over hers, muttering at how cold her fingers were. ‘If I cut you loose, Astrid, you have to promise not to go anywhere. Promise?’

It seemed to mean a lot to him, so she did. The words didn’t mean anything really; she’d not been planning on leaving and if she did she’d just have taken the chair with her. Pointing that out seemed counterproductive, though, so she sat and waited while Stephen unbuckled her arms. Her hands were shaking, fine tremors running down her arms to her fingers, sweat dripping from her fingertips.

Swearing under his breath, Stephen rubbed her hands between his.

‘It’s alright,’ he told her. ‘I’ll not let anything happen to you.’

He was so close and she knew him - had known - it seemed wrong to keep him on the outside of her mental seed. Astrid leaned forwards and rested her forehead against his. Dark hair curled around their faces.

‘I have to get her out of here,’ he thought, mind frantic with affection and worry. ‘I have to get her somewhere safe.’

‘OK,’ she said.

The world creased and Astrid pulled them into the space between things. The things that lived there took notice, interest like a weight on them, and then they were somewhere else. Safe.

The cell. Black bed like a cross, the smell of fear and breaking sharp and sour and the bright star of Jedikiah’s presence orbiting it.

No.

Astrid recoiled from what that said about her, pulling Stephen away with her. Between and back to the safest place from before. Stephen’s bedroom, morning light pouring through the windows and over the bed. The makeshift shackles still dangling from the headboard made her flinch - body cringing before her brain caught up with ‘why’.

‘How did you-’ Stephen spluttered, looking around.

Suspicion tweaked and she reached out, touching his brain with awkward mental fingers. Was he relaying back to Cara, a party-line of telepathy.

Nothing.

Astrid didn’t know if it was true, real. She wanted to trust it though.

‘I...just can,’ she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. ‘Since I got back.’

He sat down on the bed, carefully close but not too close - like she might need caught or coaxed. ‘You do remember…?’

‘No.’

She stared at him challengingly. That wasn’t something she wanted to talk about. Stephen started to argue, stopped. He swallowed the argument and nodded. ‘OK.’

Carefully still, he shifted closer and put his arm around her back. His hand tucked into the dip of her waist, fingers laying along the flare of her hip.

You didn’t tell me. It leaked through, hurt and a little sad.

‘I wanted to be normal.’

He blinked and moved back from her, the shift to physical closeness and mental contact jarring. ‘You can hear me?’

Astrid rolled her eyes. ‘Duh.’

He grinned, that slow, stupidly sweet smile that used to leave her full of sighs and shyness. It still coiled awareness around her stomach, between her hipbones. The body still knew what it wanted; the thoughts just didn’t feel...connected.

‘Can you…?’ Stephen asked, tapping his temples.

‘I don’t know,’ Astrid said, a frown twitching her brows together. ‘I’ve never tried...’

She stopped and focused, trying to imagine her voice reaching him. Words, condensed packets of meaning, shoved through the narrow slot of thought connecting them. From the way he jerked back - mouth twisting and the thought of vomit screaming from his mouth and mind - she didn’t think it had worked.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘No,’ Stephen said, rubbing his temple with the heel of his hand. ‘It was just...odd, different.’

He couldn’t read her mind; he didn’t know she was laughing at the idea that she was now a freak even among the freaks. Jedikiah called them monsters; they called her an abomination. It seemed so unfair.

‘I just miss being me,’ she admitted under his worried prompting. ‘I miss it. I miss-’

He was still holding her hand. ‘Us,’ he said. ‘I miss us.’

It was everything she’d alway wanted, the sweetness of the kiss, the taste of him on her tongue and focus on her. Never quite imagined it like this, but...normal. This was normal and she could - she leaned into the kiss, hooking her hand around the back of his neck - do normal.

  
  


 


End file.
